


one thousand suns

by bellmare



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-02
Updated: 2011-07-02
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:11:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellmare/pseuds/bellmare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"At the end, he reverted to type. He was a magician and minister to the last," she said.</p><p>I shrugged. "Well, he was a typical master to the end, too."</p>
            </blockquote>





	one thousand suns

As always, I tried to resist the summons.

 

Sure, I’ve been called into service more times than you can shake a stick at (not that I’m complaining, oh no—any magician worth their salt knows of my illustrious career and are only _tripping_ over their own feet in their haste to enlist me for my talents) but that doesn’t mean I enjoy being subjected to even _more_ servitude.

 

There was some power in those summons, even if they sounded a little out of kilter. Not quite magical strength, but some sort of ironclad will that imposed itself upon my own. Well, so be it. Evidently, this magician wasn’t to be trifled with, and wouldn’t be daunted by the likes of a jag-jawed leviathan or shambling corpse.

 

In the few seconds I had, I forced my essence into a shape I dredged up from my memory. I could have gone with a multitude of guises (this just goes to show the depth of my creativity, which honestly knows no bounds), but this time I just wanted to try something new.

 

That, and I suppose I owed it to him, after what he had done for me in the end.

 

I reproduced his form faithfully, down to the very last tuft of his porcupine-rump hair and crease of his shirt. I reproduced him as I last remembered (well, fine, perhaps a little less stooped with exhaustion and without the Pestilence-blistered skin, and without that hole in the side from where that Detonation nailed him) – I was bright of eye and dark of hair, slender (ranging on the scrawny; against my better judgment, I decided not to make him a little less weedy) of frame and clad in a dark, sober suit.

 

Wearing his face would not harm him. He had gone beyond that, to a world where my actions would no longer put him at risk. It didn’t matter now, even if I knew his birth-name. Even if I stalked through the world with his shape.

 

As I materialised in the pentacle, I tucked my hands into my trouser pockets and glanced calmly to the other circle—

 

—and nearly keeled over in shock.

 

.

 

She trembles as she waits for her words to carry over to the Other Place, painfully wary of the hesitancy of the syllables of her summons as they roll off her tongue.

 

A dead chill descends upon the room. She draws her jacket closer to her frame; the candle-flames dance and sputter; gusts of sweet-smelling incense drift towards her nose.

 

Kitty does not expect her summons to be answered, just like she does not expect the djinni to have survived. However—

 

He appears without the extravagant guises he usually favours, without the bestial, snarling howls and pungent miasmas of brimstone. Kitty expects a monstrous shape to greet her eyes, or perhaps even the form of Ptolemy of Alexandria, but—

 

The boy in the circle is not the solemn-eyed Egyptian she anticipates. Instead, Kitty finds herself gazing into the face of someone she has long thought dead, his ashes long since scattered amongst the glinting fragments of the Glass Palace.

 

“N-nathaniel,” she whispers hoarsely, dry-mouthed. The djinni opposite her seems to share her surprise; she stares, disconcerted, as the face of John Mandrake blinks bemusedly back at her.

 

“How long has it been?” a voice that isn’t his says softly as the boy takes a half-step forwards.

 

Kitty ignores the question. She gapes blankly at the erstwhile Information Minister – who seems no different from the one whose likeness has been captured a thousand times over following his death. It is the same profile she sees on every stamp she has ever stuck to every letter, the same face that gazes back at her with a kind of distant, austere sadness when she walks past the Hall of Statues.

 

“Why?” she manages as she studies the boy’s face, willing herself to see the djinni and not the youth who is no longer of this world.

 

The silence that stretches between them is like glass – fragile and brittle.

 

“I might ask you the same thing,” Bartimaeus says tiredly, slowly lowering himself into a sitting position as though each movement tires him. “Why did you call me back here? I thought you wanted no part of the magicians’ wickedness.”

 

She licks her lips, casting around aimlessly for the words that would not come. “I… I wanted to see how you were doing. I wanted to know if you survived.”

 

The demon who wears John Mandrake’s face gazes impassively up at her. “That’s a lie. It’s not just that,” he says blandly, though not unkindly. He pauses, seeming to relent. “Well, now you know. I’ve been fine, thanks for asking. Got summoned a few times here and there, destroyed some masters in between. The usual.”

 

Kitty flinches slightly at that. He chuckles. “Come on, Kitty, you know I won’t do that to you. But you have to understand. Old habits die hard.”

 

She does not reply. Bartimaeus watches as she sits down opposite him, mirroring his posture; his gaze is unflinching, unblinking, filled with the same quiet intensity she has glimpsed before in the magician’s eyes. “I suppose that now that I’m here, I should get some business out of the way.” He holds up a hand, even though Kitty has not spoken. “Mandrake told me to say hello to you for him.”

 

Never before has his alien otherness frightened her so; never before has Bartimaeus been so reticent, so subdued. She leans forwards slightly, fingers deliberately creeping towards the chalk lines of her pentacle. “I wanted to talk. _Please,_ Bartimaeus.”

 

She reaches towards his face, reaches out to bridge the space between their circles. Her hand trembles as it crosses the protective threshold; she does not stop until her fingertips brush against the curve of his jaw, until she can feel the warmth of his skin.

 

Kitty knows it is counterfeit, this heat which seems almost to burn her—a manifestation of the djinni’s affinity to fire, lending him a semblance of life. She would never have suspected him to be an otherworldly spirit, so perfect is his guise—that is, were it not for the eyes, filled with too much experience, overbright with an unnatural lustre that hints at the chaos of the Other Place.

 

The djinni shrugs expansively; he makes no move to recoil from her touch. “We’re here. So talk.”

 

Reluctantly, she leans back, absently rubbing her thumb over the lines of runes which demarcate the border of her circle. The protection of her pentacle has long since been broken, but Bartimaeus does not attempt to tear her from limb to limb. He only surveys her with a bleak weariness as he waits for her to continue their conversation. “It’s been a while since… since… you know. The world’s changed a lot since _that_. Do you remember when I first summoned you—?”

 

Bartimaeus silences her with a casual, elegant motion of his hand. “Yes. You babbled on and on about how we could all work together and how the world would turn out a better place if we did that.” At this, he smiles wryly; it is an expression that fits far too well on Nathaniel’s face. “You were right, I guess. I just didn’t expect it to come at this price, or for it to come _this_ soon, for that matter. Neither did I expect caring about Mandrake’s fate.”

 

“He saved you in the end, didn’t he?” she ventures, suddenly acutely aware of the way her heart pounds dully in her temples. “Just like Ptolemy.”

 

.

 

Well, I was surprised, all right. Sure, I expected some magician would call me forth again to undertake whatever menial task they decided to saddle me with, but I would never have expected the girl to summon me again.

 

She hadn’t changed much, that was for sure. I don’t think it was even that long since that night, but nonetheless, she seemed no different: there was still that old fire in her eyes (even if she was still a fair bit wrinklier than anyone her age was), and her face had all of that old expressiveness I remembered.

 

I think being back in dreary, rain-soused London was having an effect on me. Perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was the fact that the girl was the one who brought me back here. Perhaps it was the fact that I was wearing Nathaniel’s form and she was probably the first one to see it since he had gone striding into the Glass Palace in his blaze of suicidal glory.

 

Either way, I wasn’t really in the mood for some witty banter or idle chitchat. Something about seeing the girl again, and the fact that she reminded me of everything I had tried to escape from. I couldn’t look at her without remembering Nouda bearing down upon Nathaniel and me. I thought we faced certain death back then; I was already steeling myself for the inevitable (i.e., several millennia of achievements going down the drain) when he spoke the Dismissal. Never in a thousand years would I have thought Mandrake would do what he did.

Before I could open my mouth to demand that she dismiss me, she started to talk, and with each word it was like she was reopening all the old wounds several thousand years of jaded existence had failed to heal.

 

“Just like Ptolemy,” I conceded quietly, cupping my chin in one hand. “After that, I can’t even find it in myself to take the mickey out of him. It’d seem almost like an insult to his memory if I did.”

 

Kitty snorted but made no comment. In truth, it _was_ hard. Normally, I had no qualms about parading around as, say, Solomon in all his wrinkly glory, or appearing as Zarbustibal with his gigantic toucan-beak honker and proceeding to sing bawdy sailor shanties and daubing rude graffiti on the city walls. If that benighted boy had just carried on being an insufferable master to the end, I wouldn’t have minded (theoretically, seeing as how I would technically be dead if that were the case) wandering about as how he had been when we was fourteen (all ostentatious suits and disturbingly Niagara-esque hair he was at the time). Now, I couldn’t bring myself to even add more muscle to his skinny frame. Heck, if the girl bothered to look, I had him copied down to the scar on his shoulder that came from that silver disc the mercenary had chucked at him.

 

It was all about his memory now. The memory of John Mandrake, now immortalised as the saviour of London.

 

I remembered that first time I had met him, how I had disdained the skinny, pasty little boy he had been. If you told me then that I would come to respect him and hold him in the same high esteem as Ptolemy, I’d have found it the most devilishly hilarious thing I’d ever heard.

 

Perhaps now, all around London – or even the world, even – there would be multitudes of apprentice magicians looking up their new names in the nominative almanac, and pointing at Mandrake’s. They would aspire to be him; they would dream of fame and glory. In turn, they would be chided by their masters for being too ambitious, too arrogant…

 

This time, it would be deemed as the height of childish impudence to assume John Mandrake’s name. No matter the century, it would be too recent to sully, too great to associate with the likes of knobble-kneed pipsqueaks still dreaming of summoning their first mouler.

 

Ah, irony. It’s odd, isn’t it?

 

My master would be glad to know he made such an impression on the world. The second Gladstone, they were calling him. That’s what I heard, anyways, when I skulked in the Other Place, occasionally hearing from other spirits who were summoned into the world following the aftermath of Nouda’s rampage.

 

She was studying me again, with that odd look on her face. I looked away. “If you have nothing else to say—”

 

“We achieved everything I had hoped for,” she said in a rush. The words seemed to tumble out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Britain is now run by a commoner government, though we still have a few magicians who operate as advisors and the like. We’ve come a long way since… _that_.”

 

“Sure seems like it,” I said. “Give yourself a pat on the back for that.”

 

A few more seconds of silence. I could practically feel myself ageing as I waited for her to gabble out whatever was on her mind. I didn’t try to prompt or interrupt her, though—we were long past that.

 

“His funeral.” At this, something in her seemed to snap. Kitty seemed to fold in upon herself, hands clenching into fists in her lap. “He got a send-off fit for a king.”

 

I nodded, in no mood to discuss the fragility of human life. They were always frightfully dreary affairs, funerals. I was glad nobody summoned me to help with the preparations or anything (it’s pretty depressing business, if you don’t know already. All those waterworks and the depressing atmosphere, the copious making of sad faces for all to see – it was enough to dampen the spirits of even the most debonair and carefree of djinn). I don’t think I could have taken it. “Well, er, I suppose he deserved it—”

 

“Do you have any idea what it was like, Bartimaeus?” She looked up to me at last; despite the alarming quivery quality of her voice, her eyes were dry. “Hearing all those people who didn’t know him, making all those speeches about how he was a great man who would be missed… most of them didn’t even know half of who he was. He wouldn’t have liked all those processions and speeches, or—”

 

I let her ramble on. It was good for her, this outpouring of emotion. I don’t think she got to do it too often.

 

“—and in truth, I didn’t even know what he was like until those last few hours, Bartimaeus. I thought I hated him, back when he was hunting me, but—”

 

When she finally calmed down sufficiently and had scrubbed furiously at her eyes for a few seconds, her voice was level again. “He was a magician and minister to the end, Bartimaeus,” she said bitterly. I preoccupied myself with watching the way in which her knuckles strained white against her skin as she glowered at the floor. “He lied. He didn’t keep his promise.”

 

“You know he would have if he could. You didn’t know him when he was a kid. Even back then, d’you know what mattered the most to him? His pride—” Kitty made a small, disparaging sound in her throat, which sounded midway between a laugh and a teary hiccough. “—and the people he cared about. Believe you me, back then there was only one person, and you should have seen the way he acted after she was killed. He was inconsolable. I think in those few days, getting her death off of his conscience meant a lot more to him than avenging himself on Lovelace, no matter what he told me. What I mean to say is, he evidently cared enough about you to break his promises.”

 

I doubted that she knew what I was talking about. Most of this probably went over her head, for all I knew.

 

I paused. Giving comfort had never being my strong suit. “If you didn’t know already, Nathaniel was still… a person of principle. He still had morals, even if they were still buried beneath all those layers of Mandrake.” (Too right. I always thought it was because of Mandrake’s links to Nathaniel that he kept me around, no matter how much lip I gave him. I always thought he could never bring himself to sever those ties, and you know what? In those last few seconds as Nouda bore down on us, I rather think he finally acknowledged it. You know that they say about denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt.)

 

I wound up my impassioned speech, allowing my voice to peter out. Kitty was staring vaguely at some point over my shoulder, apparently lost in thought. I waggled my hand in front of her eyes. “Hello? Anybody home?”

 

With an effort, she roused herself, hugging her knees to her chest.

 

“He was a typical master to the very end, too,” I added, half to myself. “It was all about _‘no, I’m not letting you do this because you’re going to fluff this up like you always do or see some new condition I oversaw’_. Didn’t even let me get a single word or thought in before he was cutting me off and bossing me around again. Old habits die hard for everyone, Kitty. I think he wanted to go on clinging to the last shreds of Mandrake, even if he was going to die as Nathaniel.”

 

She was silent for what seemed like an age. Then—

 

“Thank you, Bartimaeus.”

 

.

 

“Thank you, Bartimaeus.”

 

Even to her own ears, her voice sounds thin and painfully frail. With an effort, Kitty forces herself to meet his eyes, to look upon the face of the long-dead magician. Her breath catches in her throat; it is hard to breathe. “I guess I… just needed to talk to someone.”

 

His expression shifts slightly; the djinni looks almost rueful. “I’m sorry, too,” he sighs. “For not coming around earlier. It’s been quite long, hasn’t it? It’s about time we caught up, for old times’ sake.”

 

“For old times’ sake,” she agrees.

 

Bartimaeus smiles, sharp as knives. “So,” he inquires pleasantly, tones slipping into a more lighthearted register as he steeples his fingers. “What _have_ you been up to since?”

**Author's Note:**

> Re-reading Ptolemy's Gate always makes me sad, no matter how many times I've gone through those final few chapters. Stroud is a great author, and this series will always have a place in my heart.


End file.
